[ ] Nowadays, children are in a remarkably analogous position to that of
the white women who used to be "protected" by lynch mobs of Ku Klux
Klansmen in the American South. The dominant white male culture of the old South
in the slavery era held that women, like today's children, were not sexual
beings; they were pure. Thus if there was any sexual contact between them and a
black man it could only mean one thing: rape. White ladies were not allowed to
have sexual feelings for black men; it was literally unthinkable. Women who
dared to break this iron taboo were ladies no longer, just whores.

Nowadays, the locus of sexual anxiety has shifted towards children. As this
anxiety has been cranked up and up in recent decades, we have been seeing
increasingly repressive measures designed not to protect children themselves but
to protect the myth of childhood innocence in which society has invested so
heavily. Punishing children for sexual involvement with adults, however, would
be too nakedly a contradiction of their victim status. It would imply they had
known what they were doing, and were not innocent. In order to preserve this
notional innocence of the child, it is far easier to blame the adult, the
despised paedophile, whatever the facts of the case may have been.

But when children have sex with each other there is no adult available to
blame. Scapegoating the paedophile as-it-were "ethnic minority" is not
an option. Instead, the repression of children's sexuality needs a secondary
scapegoat. Clinging ever more desperately to the dogma that children in general
are non-sexual, a minority of kids are being stigmatised as deviants and
delinquents when they are caught in sexual activity with their peers. There have
even been attempts to criminalise sexual activities in which no single child
played a dominant role, so that it was not possible to blame an allegedly
abusive power relationship of a bigger or older child over a smaller or younger
one.

Childrens privacy

Creating the concept of child sexual deviants, analogous to
"fallen" Southern women, has been one aspect of modern Western
society's efforts to preserve the innocence myth. Ideally, from a conservative
point of view, the embarrassment of seeing kids on sex registers and exposed as
sex ring participants, would be avoided if at all possible. So what we are
seeing alongside these highly public but fairly rare cases is a much more
pervasive phenomenon: the invasion of all children's privacy for the
purpose of sexual repression.

Children, it is true, have always been spied on by their parents. Rightly or
wrongly, mom  usually mom not dad  has gone rooting through pockets, and
bedroom drawers. If a youngster has kept a diary, chances have always been it
would be read by a parent from time to time, especially if the child insisted
its contents were secret. Nothing new in that.

[ ]

COPPA

What we are seeing now is an increased level of parental anxiety to such an
extent that it is finding political expression, with the force of legislation
deployed to systematically invade children's private lives. COPPA, The Children's
Online Privacy Protection Act in the US is a prime example. This measure,
which is not yet operational and which is rightly being resisted by the broadly
anti-censorship online community, would require that any website or online
service directed to children should obtain parental consent before collecting
information from children under the age of 13. [ ] What it looks like to me is
not protection of their privacy but invasion of it  the language of the law
is an Orwellian inversion of the truth.

The threat of COPPA is that it would extend parental control over their
children in the one area where they have enjoyed a small measure of personal
freedom and privacy in recent years, thanks to the relative lack of
net-headedness and technical savvy of many parents. Kids have to some extent
been left alone in their bedrooms, able to explore the cyber world with a
freedom no longer available to them in the physical world of their immediate
environment. [ ]

Concerned, loving parents have been sold the myth that it's a big bad world
out there, with weird strangers out to get their kids and do unspeakable things.
But real horrors are exceedingly rare and the most truly abusive acts against
children, including murder, take place in the home, perpetrated by parents 
"family values" are only as good as the family that holds them. So
what we are getting, in the name of protecting children first from
"stranger danger" and now from the Wild Wild Web, is constant
surveillance and control over all children, such that they have no space to be
themselves. They have no private life, no way of standing a little apart from
their adult controllers in ways that enable them to develop as autonomous
individuals. [ ]